A system that would allow airline passengers to use GSM wireless phones moved a step closer to reality last week when Arinc and Telenor, two companies partnered to deploy such technology, unveiled the name for its in-flight cell phone service and announced a pair of hardware manufacturing partners.

The companies named the new service AeroMobile. Airline passengers will be able to make calls through the Inmarsat equipment that are currently deployed on many airlines right now. Arinc and Telenor said they are reading demonstration flights with AeroMobile in the middle of this year.

The companies also announced two manufacturing partners. The companies selected a high-perfomance ruggedized communications server supplied from VT Miltope as the on-board hub for passenger communications and what the companies describe as the world’s smallest GSM picocell base station supplied from U.K. technology firm ip.access.

Clearing The Regulatory Hurdle

While naming the manufacturing partners is only a step in the direction toward public deployment, the bigger challenge that lies ahead for this service is clearing the regulatory hurdles.

“We are working very hard on both the regulatory side and the certification side,” Bernt Fanghol, vice president of mobile connectivity for Telenor New Business, told Satellite News, referring to regulatory hurdles that exist in both the United States and Europe. “The whole industry is working together. We are working together with our competitors to be able to achieve regulatory approvals and the certification side. On the certification side, both Airbus and Boeing are doing immense amounts of work to prove that it is safe to fly with mobile telephones aboard. And the telecommunications regulations are being worked through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) process in the United States.” He added that similar events are occurring in Europe with the equivalent regulatory bodies.

“There is a very hard push in the industry to make this come true,” Fanghol said. “When you have the precedents of what is being done on the U.S. side and on the European side, that will be guidance for the rest of the world as well.”

How soon these regulatory hurdles can be cleared, however, is still up for debate. Fanghol offered an optimistic appraisal, saying he expected those hurdles “to be cleared by the end of the year.”

But that may not be the case. The FCC only approved the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on in-flight cell phones last December and the comment period for that NPRM does not close until this month. Plus Erin McGee, spokeswoman for CTIA-The Wireless Association, told Satellite News that a group comprised of representatives from the airlines, plane manufacturers, the wireless industry, the FCC and the Federal Aviation Administration will not have a report completed on the topic until next year, suggesting that regulatory clearance is not as close as Telenor would like it to be.

McGee said the report would be looking at a variety of issues, including whether the service would cause interference with the navigation and other avionics equipment. It also will determine if the service, when deployed on a wide scale, might cause interference with terrestrial wireless networks.

Etiquette

And while the technical side of the equation may be addressable, there still remains the experience of flying in a cabin with people talking on cell phones and whether that will make for an unpleasant experience.

Fanghol noted that the system will come with a certain degree of flexibility to give the airlines control over how the service is used while the plane is in flight.

“The system also is equipped with a crew control panel so, depending on specific airline policies and the needs of specific flights, it can control the service to allow all the services to run, disable the possibility of having incoming calls to prevent the cabin from filling with ringtones,” Fanghol said. “You can disable voice altogether and just have SMS possibilities. Or you can disable all communications through the system.” He also noted that the system would have a fixed number of users, which would offer another level of controls over how the service is used.

But whether the service gets off the ground commercially will ultimately be decided by the airlines. And if flight attendants get their way, terrestrial wireless may remain a terrestrial service.

A poll of U.S. citizens, the results of which were released last week by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and the National Consumer League, suggest that they would rather the cell phone ban remain in place. The poll reveals that passengers are most concerned about the effects of cell phone use on airplane safety.

“This is something that will be very important to handle together with the large customers to communicate the social issues to the passengers, that there is no danger to making any calls and the plane will not crash when you make a phone call,” Fanghol said.

The other fear, more communicated by the flight attendants, is that use of a cell phone could make the already bad environment for air rage even worse.

“In terms of etiquette, it is probably going to be something that is dictated by the airlines and how they want their consumers to use the phones,” McGee said. “I do not know how much different it would be from consumers using it on the ground. I think a lot of the etiquette tips that apply on the ground apply in the air.”

–Gregory Twachtman

(Erin McGee, CTIA, 202/736-2980; Bernt Fanghol, Telenor, +47 90822266)